Hi,
My name is Brian, I am a trainer that works in Connecticut and New York. I work with ranges of kids and adults with most my clients being high school athletes and the average adult between the ages of 35-45. I wanted to get your input on a subject because I really value the information you put out. A lot of the demographic in the areas that I work are people trying to get into better shape, and generally most of them just want a program where they are constantly moving and not taking much rest times between sets. For the most part I am able to create a program around squats, presses, and deadlifts using RPE to manage training stress and gauge the difficulty of their working sets. Just for example I will program sets of goblet squats ranging in RPE’s of 6-8 and then pair that with another exercise like walking lunges to get some extra quad work in plus it works on different exercise variations and it keeps them moving. I was curious to hear your perspective about how to go about clients like this who need to constantly be moving and how you would go about programming for them. Any feedback is appreciated and I continue to look forward to your crews work at BBM!
Work with what works. If you develop the “optimal” program for strength training for someone who just wants to “workout” and doesn’t comply, (stops showing up) well, it’s not that optimal is it.
Discuss what the trainee’s goals are for their time in the gym, and discuss how what you are doing accomplishes those goals.
my preferred mode for supersets is to either work in some bench/overhead press sets between Squat sets, or perform sets on the antagonist muscles like Press/rows or pull-ups.
I was a trainer as well in a commercial gym.
The hardest part for me was coming to terms with the fact that I had to write them a severely sub-optimal program to have any chance of them adhering to it - and honestly I never really did fully accept it.
I did manage to convince most of my clients of pure barbell style strength training, but for the one’s who I could tell really loved the whole “Keep moving and sweating aspect of it” I would compromise by spending the last 15 minutes of a session with a “burn out”. For example it would just be something like 30 walking lunges supersetted with 20 air squats for 5 rounds. I always made sure to iterate that the barbell stuff was what was most important and that we’ll get to the “burn out” portion if we had time.
I am like you guys. When I was a runner I treated it like a sport. Now that I am lifting I treat it like a sport. I always want to improve and work towards the best number I can get. Thus I am always looking for optimal programming to improve my numbers. But a lot of people don’t treat it as a sport. Its a way to stay healthy and looks and feel better for them.
I am not a trainer, but I work with clients in another field. Sometimes its obvious, but if its not obvious I am ask them what their goal is. Once they tell you their goal, I think you have to respect it rather than substituting your own values.
In your situation, I’d imagine if somebody tells you their goal is to get stronger you’d benefit from asking a few more questions to figure out if they want to treat strength training as a sport or they just want to improve their general strength. And that may change over time.